Sunday, June 29, 2014

My Response to "Who Murdered Jane Austen?"

Clearly,
Mark Shernick (the author of the blog post) did a lot of homework, and did a
clever job of stringing all the pieces together in a flowing and engaging
narrative. But there are so many permutations of each of the links in his chain
of argument, there are so many potential cross and doublecross purposes of all
of the key players, so many begged questions, that a number of alternative and
conflicting explanations would, with little tweaking, also fit the pattern he
has articulated. All the same, Shernick undeniably spins a very good yarn, and
even though I wasn't convinced, I enjoyed reading it and having my own
assumptions challenged in an entertaining, intelligent way.

To
me, the greatest weakness in Shernick's argument is how little it depends on
what is written in JA's novels (and letters) themselves—other than his picking
up on Colleen Sheehan's article (about her discovery of the "Prince of
Whales" and "Lamb" code words hidden in the
"courtship" charade in Emma--and how strange that he doesn't repeat
them explicitly, for effect, for the many readers who would not bother to
follow the link), Shernick seems completely unaware of any other satirical portraits of patriarchal ogres in JA's writing,
including not only the Prince Regent, but also James I, Warren Hastings, among other
public figures, to JA’s own relatives and acquaintances.

E.g.,
Shernick portrays Warren Hastings as a New Tory Godfather "protecting"
the Austen family (making the Austens sound a little like the Medicis, even
though, ironically, Shernick apparently is unaware of the Galligai-Medicis
connection in JA's Letter 159 to Anne Sharpe) and as the arch enemy of the
Prince Regent. But Shernick apparently doesn't realize that JA repeatedly
skewered Hastings himself in the characters of Sir Thomas Bertram and Colonel
Brandon, among others.

Whereas
I follow Occam's Razor--I've found that the single coherent theory that fits
the most facts about both JA's writing and JA's biography the best --that
explains why, e.g., she would skewer BOTH the Prince Regent AND his political
enemy Hastings --- is that she was a covert radical feminist -- and she was an
equal opportunity satirist in that regard, skewering taking on both Warren
Hastings AND the Prince Regent, looking past their disparate politics, and
instead focusing on the common denominator between them, i.e., their abuse of
patriarchal power over women.

This
is a simpler and more powerful explanation, for why anyone would want to
silence JA, whether during her lifetime by dire physical means, or, long after
her death, by JEAL & his ilk of whitewashers of JA's life and fiction.
There is not enough “smoke” to support the claim that there was afoot in the
Regency Era a covert desire to take revenge for her sharp satires, against her
and/or against the Austen family, as if she were the literary mouthpiece for
the Borgias or Medicis of Regency Era England!

And,
finally, as to whetheranyone at all actually murdered Jane
Austen, I remain agnostic on that point, pending any dramatic finding of
super-saturation of her hair with levels of arsenic or another poison that
could only have occurred culpably, and not via innocent administration of food
and drugs to her.

What
is clear to me is that JA was a whistleblower who covertly exposed the
wrongdoing of a lot of people, mostly men, doing bad things, mostly to women,
and so there clearly was motivation to silence her among those who were being
exposed, if they were aware of what she was up to in her writing. Butit’s obviously a huge leap from motive and
opportunity to actual doing of such a dark deed.

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A lovely bit of praise from my youngest (at heart) supporter in Seattle:

"...Two sessions were outstanding: Juliet McMasters on the more subtle, deeper meanings of "Northanger Abbey" and a Darcy-like young lawyer, Arnie Perlstein, who revealed his very plausible theory that the "shadow story" behind much of Jane Austen's work is the horror of multiple childbirth and women's deaths. I am a Jane-Austen-as-feminist person and this really resonated with me!"

Thank you, Mary!

"Arnie's theories [about Austen and Shakespeare] may strain credulity, but so much the greater his triumph if they turn out to have persuasive force after they are properly presented and maturely considered. That is what publication is all about"

"When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this sublunary world—the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind of a substance, naturally takes a flight behind the scenes to see what is the cause and first spring of them."--Tristram Shandy

About Me

I'm a 65 year old independent scholar (still) working on a book project about the SHADOW STORIES of Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays). I first read Austen in 1995, an American male real estate lawyer, i.e., a Janeite outsider. I therefore never "learned" that there was no secret subtext in her novels. All I did was to closely read and reread her novels, while participating in stimulating online group readings. Then, in 2002, I whimsically wondered whether Willoughby stalked Marianne Dashwood and staged their “accidental” meeting. I retraced his steps, followed the textual “bread crumbs”, and verified my hunch. I've since made numerous similar discoveries about offstage scheming by various characters. In hindsight, it was my luck not only to be a lawyer, but also a lifelong solver of NY Times and other difficult American crossword puzzles. These both trained me to spot complex patterns based on fragmentary data, to interpret cryptic clues of all kinds, and, above all, not to give up until I’ve completed the puzzle--and literary sleuthing Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays) is, bar none, the best puzzle solving in the world!